Gravity

ITWASQUITE the genius stroke of Hol­ly­wood clev­er­ness how the pro­mo­tional mate­ri­als Alfonso Cuarón’s stuck-in-space thriller Grav­ity touted the omi­nously sug­ges­tive line, “Don’t let go.” After all, if there’s one uni­ver­sal and unimag­in­able fear that 99.9% of movie­go­ers have never expe­ri­enced but can nev­er­the­less vividly imag­ine with­out much effort, it must be the sheer ter­ror of los­ing grip on what­ever was teth­er­ing you to humanly exis­tence and tum­bling off into the far­thest reaches of cold, dark space. But through­out the film, the pro­tag­o­nist of Grav­ity, an emo­tion­ally injured and increas­ingly belea­guered astro­naut played by San­dra Bul­lock, reg­u­larly finds her­self not in dan­ger of let­ting go but rather fac­ing the dire con­se­quences of not let­ting go. And therein lies the beauty of Grav­ity. “Don’t let go”—if you let go, you die—represents what Grav­ity is on the sur­face, which is a sur­vival thriller set in space, a race-against-the-clock actioner that phys­i­cally pits our hero­ine against incred­i­ble odds and over­whelm­ing obsta­cles on her jour­ney to get back to Earth. “Let go”—if you don’t let go, you won’t ever live—succinctly sums up the psy­cho­log­i­cal jour­ney that Ms. Bullock’s char­ac­ter must undergo in the length of ninety min­utes. This para­dox­i­cal par­al­lelism sounds cheesy, and while it is, in a way, Mr. Cuarón presents the two themes together with­out embell­ish­ment or empha­sis on the melo­dra­matic, which results in a nat­u­rally occur­ring and won­der­fully organic kind of cheesy. Grav­ity is not high art but per­fectly enter­tain­ing— the kind of Hol­ly­wood block­buster that enrap­tures you on the edge of your seat by value of its dra­mat­i­cal purity as much as by the stun­ning visual effects and other expen­sive tech­ni­cal achieve­ments (the sound design and score is notable). Some have claimed that it’s the “small­est” Hol­ly­wood block­buster in a while, or an inti­mate indie film cloaked as a big and loud movie-event expe­ri­ence. It’s not. It’s a big, loud movie-event expe­ri­ence pulled off with sophis­ti­cated restraint and min­i­mal­ism. With George Clooney as George Clooney, a suave vet­eran astro­naut with a pen­chant for lis­ten­ing to coun­try music while lazily jet­pack­ing around in Earth’s orbit. From 2013. A